“My son went to get some flour for his family, but came back in a coffin and a death shroud.”
These are the words of father-of-six Iyad Abu Darabi describing how Israeli forces killed his 25-year-old son Mussa in southern Gaza in the first few weeks of June.
Desperate and starving, the young man had snuck off against his family’s will to collect food from a specially designated distribution site backed by Israel and run by the deeply controversial US-based non-profit Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
Almost all aid going into Gaza now runs through the American aid group, which started operations in May following a months-long Israeli blockade of nearly all food and aid. Food is handed out at overcrowded and deadly sites overseen by American private security contractors and the Israeli army.
Gazans have described the sites as “American death zones” because of the contractors who patrol them.
The foundation has been shrouded in secrecy, with obscure sources of funding and several changes in leadership and management since its launch.
Gaza’s health ministry said that Israeli forces opening fire on crowds trying to reach the GHF food distribution points have killed nearly 400 Palestinians and wounded more than 3,000 since aid deliveries were reinstated in late May.
Several videos from the sites show people cowering or running from gunfire, struggling to carry bags of food as they escape.
Despite the carnage, the Trump administration is said to be considering funding the organization to the tune of $500 million through the recently downsized US Agency for International Development (USAID).
This week though, the world’s focus has been on the growing clashes between Israel and Iran. The two sides have traded thousands of missiles, drones and bombs in a raging conflict that threatens to engulf the entire Middle East and draw in countries from around the world.
It has overshadowed the desperate events in Gaza, where the two-million-strong population is trapped in the snare of famine, according to the United Nations. An unprecedented Israeli bombardment of the tiny 35-mile-long strip has killed over 55,000 people since Hamas militants’ bloody attacks on southern Israel in October 2023.
Mussa was just one of hundreds who have lost their lives in the desperate search for food.
Witnesses and families of those killed say Israeli forces opened fire on the massive crowds gathered that day as hungry civilians scrambled for food in a desert wasteland. He was hit by tank fire, and killed instantly alongside women and children, Iyad says.
“The aid is a death trap for young people: in a barren land surrounded by fences, the gates are opened for tens of thousands to fight over supplies without any order. Israel leaves people fighting each other over food,” Iyad says in desperation.
“He went without my knowledge and because of extreme hunger. But this is not aid, it is an opportunity for more killing.”
The Israeli military has acknowledged firing warning shots at people gathered for aid, but denies targeting civilians in Gaza or turning aid distribution sites into “death traps”. It told The Independent that at least one incident is “under review.”
“The IDF regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals and operates to minimise harm as much as possible to them, while maintaining the safety of our troops,” it added.
The GHF said this incident did not occur at a GHF site and in a press release Monday claimed it had distributed more than three million meals at its four distribution sites “without incident”.
The latest – and deadliest – incident took place on Tuesday. The health ministry said that 59 people were killed and more than 200 wounded while waiting for United Nations and commercial trucks to enter the territory with desperately needed food.
Palestinian witnesses said that Israeli forces carried out an airstrike on a nearby home before opening fire towards the crowd in the southern city of Khan Younis.
While the shooting did not appear to be related to the newly launched Israeli-backed GHF network — it is an indication of the deadly struggle Palestinians face every day to get food, at a time when a kilo of sugar is now $70. Randa Youssef, 42, a single mother-of-three, says her cousin Mohammed was killed on 5 June while attempting to get food from a GHF site in Rafah. She said Mohammed was due to be married just three days later.
“He was shot in the back and fell to the ground. There was no means of transport. He bled to death for three hours amid continuous gunfire,” Randa explains.
“We can’t afford the basic necessities. A kilo of sugar costs $70 today. That’s why we risk our lives. My son sometimes cries. I honestly don’t know what to feed him.
“This American aid is deliberate chaos.”
The Biden administration paid lip service to trying to convince Israel to allow aid into Gaza without achieving much in the way of results, but the Trump administration has largely taken a hands-off approach.
Israel cut off the supply of most food and aid to Gaza in March, causing hunger to skyrocket across the Strip. Humanitarian groups have warned that most of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are at risk of starvation unless aid deliveries are ramped up.
The GHF system began in May, but aid groups have warned it is wholly insufficient to meet the needs of the population. The UN and other humanitarian organisations have also warned of the risk of friction between Israeli troops and civilians seeking supplies, and continue to call for an immediate ceasefire and unrestricted aid access.
Former officials from the US State Department and USAID who have worked on emergency aid delivery described the new system as “grotesque,” “dangerous,” and part of a larger plan to use desperately needed aid to control the movement of Palestinians.
“What is so infuriatingly tragic about this is that it’s playing out exactly as any experienced humanitarian could have predicted,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw famine relief for three years during the Obama administration and is now president of Refugees International.
“When you have an aid distribution model that is premised on forcing huge crowds of desperately hungry people to cluster directly adjacent to IDF military installations, you’re going to get massacres,” he added.
Konyndyk said it was “not a coincidence” that most of the distribution sites were in the south of Gaza, at a time when the Israeli army is trying to force Palestinians out of the north of the territory.
“A basic principle of humanitarian response is you move the aid as close to you can to where the people are. They’re doing the opposite of that, the diametric opposite of that, which suggests that they want to draw people to the south,” he said.
“I think that is highly suggestive of the longer-term agenda here,” he added.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans last month to force Palestinians to move to southern Gaza after his security cabinet approved an expanded military operation in the northern and central parts of the territory.
“There will be a movement of the population to protect them,” Netanyahu said of the operation.
Stacey Gilbert, who resigned from the State Department in 2024 over the Biden administration’s failure to hold Israel accountable for blocking aid to Gaza, called the sites “another stunt” along the lines of previous efforts by the Biden administration.
“It’s a stunt like the air drops. It’s a stunt like the floating pier debacle. These are all ways that both the Biden administration, now the Trump administration, are using to try to obscure the fact that they’re going to these extraordinarily dangerous and extraordinarily expensive efforts because Israel is blocking aid. There’s no other way to see it,” she told The Independent.
“It is so humiliating and undignified and just dangerous, straight out dangerous for everyone involved,” she added.
Gilbert, too, believes the sites are located primarily in the south to draw Palestinians away from the north.
“This is trying to draw them all to one area, to get them away from the area that Israel doesn’t want them in,” she said.
Despite hundreds of deaths at the GHF sites and an insufficient level of aid getting into Gaza, the Trump administration appears to be leaving the door open to backing it financially.
A State Department spokesperson told The Independent that the GHF was “an independent organization. It does not receive USG funding.”
“Nevertheless, we are constantly looking for creative solutions to get aid into Gaza without it being looted by Hamas,” the spokesperson added.
Israel insists the new system was necessary because aid was being diverted to Hamas under the previous long-established system, managed by the United Nations — a charge denied by the UN and by Hamas.
For Salwa al-Daghma, from the southern city of Khan Younis, “this aid is a morsel of food soaked in blood.”
Her brother Khaled, a father-of-five, was shot dead by a sniper earlier this month at another GHF site in Rafah when he tried to get just a kilo of flour for his children – the youngest just over two years old.
Again, Israeli forces opened fire on the massive crowds when chaos broke out.
“He was hit by a bullet directly in the head. His brain came out the other side, and he was killed instantly,” she said. “Israel closed the crossings and banned food, and they came to us with a method to kill our children and families.”
“This is a death trap, not an aid point. They don’t want to help us – they are actually killing us.”
